Please join us this Monday as we continue our exploration of symbols, branding and persuasion as they relate to activist and creative practice.

At the intersection of semiotics and psychoanalysis lies advertising, most often deployed in service of selling stuff. For this installment of our series, author Carrie McClaren and artist Steve Lambert will present projects that engage a sense of play as they leverage principles of the persuasion industries, to both critique consumer culture and question the power structures at work in our daily lives.

ABOUT STEVE LAMBERT

Steve Lambert is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. He founded the outdoor, guerilla art gallery, the Budget Gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004. Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Belle Foundation, and others. He earned the Best Public Art award from the San Francisco Weekly in 2008. His work has been shown nationally in cities like Detroit, New York, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as internationally in Havana, Canada, Barcelona, and Rotterdam. Writings about his work have appeared in multiple publications such as the New York Times, Punk Planet, Artweek, and Newsweek magazine and featured on National Public Radio.

ABOUT CARRIE MCLAREN

Carrie McLaren is the founder of the now defunct Stay Free! magazine, and editor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, a compendium of new and previously published material on the impact of consumer culture on our lives (June, 2009). A longtime blogger, she is currently at Consumerist, a website owned by the publishers of Consumer Reports. She is the curator of Adult Education, a “useless lecture series” based in Brooklyn, New York. In a previous life, she organized the Illegal Art Exhibit, a traveling multimedia art show and website devoted to copyright reform. A former advertising columnist for the Village Voice, her writing has also appeared in Newsday, Mother Jones, Time Out NY, and SPIN magazine, among others. Carrie lives in Brooklyn with one each of husband, son and cat.

The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage is home to Williamsburg Coworking and a project of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The multi-purpose venue hosts free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations. The space also houses a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite for Not An Alternative’s Communication Department. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like minded cultural producers.